Performance seems worse than ever

[fogpipe]

Havent played in a while and thought i would check out the new update and performance is notably worse than it used to be.

As usual the game ignores refresh rates, unlike every other game i play and wont alt tab cleanly.

I have no problem getting 120 fps with this game whether on low or high graphics options and the stutters and jerks are amazing to see.

I dont have these problems with any other flight game i play, dcs and elite dangerous mostly, so whats going on with this particular game?

I have tried all the recommended graphics options and every time i try to play il2 box i spend more time trying to tweak acceptable performance out of it that i do playiing it. Its just no fun.

[kendo]

nope...at least not for most...

 

 

[Guster]

I'm getting a few more fps since 5.0002, but I still get the odd micro stutter with the Normandy map. No biggie though and I'm sure the devs will look into it and continue optimizing the game.

[Strewth]

I run Reverb G2 with RTX 3060ti and OpenXR.
On current settings, I was getting a steady 90fps most of the time with it only dropping to 75fps under heavy action.
Now I get only 80 to 83fps max.
Great update, but hit my fps s bit.

 

[76SQN-Minimayhemtemp]

I think OP is making an important point here and it's key we distinguish between FPS issues and the stuttering we see in game, mainly SP, which seems to have no relation to FPS. 

 

I run a Q2 w/ 3070Ti, 64gb blah blah and high graphics, locked to 70fps at all times but go anywhere near AI - and bam, stuttering.  Doesnt matter whether that's AI plane or ground targets, there's stuttering.

[Guster]

13 minutes ago, 76SQN-Minimayhemtemp said:

I think OP is making an important point here and it's key we distinguish between FPS issues and the stuttering we see in game, mainly SP, which seems to have no relation to FPS. 

 

I run a Q2 w/ 3070Ti, 64gb blah blah and high graphics, locked to 70fps at all times but go anywhere near AI - and bam, stuttering.  Doesnt matter whether that's AI plane or ground targets, there's stuttering.

 

Exactly what I'm seeing, but apparently only on the Normandy map. I've set Low Latency Mode to Ultra which took away a few fps but made panning much smoother. Still I get the occasional micro stutter even with just a few planes in the air.

[firdimigdi]

7 hours ago, Raptorattacker said:

A human eye can only percieve not much more than 60fps anyway so people getting het up about losing a few of their 320fps (exagg!) here and there is quite amusing... 

 

That's not the problem reported though and you're just being condescending for the sake of it.

 

The issue is that the reported framerate remains high, or is locked to the maximum the monitor or VR headset can achieve and any associated metrics (like frametimes, both GPU and CPU) remain well within acceptable levels; yet the game is not smooth, planes appear to ghost and so does the terrain when you roll and look sideways.

 

This is a problem that's been in singleplayer for a while now and affects career, scripted campaigns and recently AQMB and is not alleviated by reducing graphical settings - you can even play on low preset, low resolution with everything set to minimum and it will still occur. It does not happen in MP; in fact you can convert a mission displaying this problem to MP format, host it on another PC and play it and it plays perfectly fine. This hints that it is something happening with CPU usage (which when monitored remains low, even at a per-core level).

 

As it has been reported to occur on both Intel and AMD CPUs and on high-end models of both brands it is not simply a matter of "not enough CPU power" - it's something in the game engine. I've given up trying to guess what, but in an extensive bug report thread I had written sometime ago when I monitored the game process what stood out was that the more AI were active in the game the more CPU time a certain function of the game's UI would use despite there not being any UI element visible on screen.

 

Edited October 20, 2022 by firdimigdi

[Russkly]

I've noticed a frame drop since 5.002, largely in cockpit view.

 

In external view I still get ~70fps but this drops to ~55 in cockpit view.

 

This wasn't the case until recently.

 

However, I'm unsure whether this is due to 5.002 or to the recently-reported issues with Win 11 22H2.

[Mewt]

3 hours ago, Raptorattacker said:

A human eye can only percieve not much more than 60fps anyway so people getting het up about losing a few of their 320fps (exagg!) here and there is quite amusing... 

It's a complicated subject but the difference between playing flatscreen at 60 vs 120 is hugely noticeable. 120 vs 240 etc much less so.

Also VR users need a constant lock at 80 or 90 for most headsets to work without any motion interpretation stuff going on.

[NanashiAnjin]

3 hours ago, Raptorattacker said:

A human eye can only percieve not much more than 60fps anyway so people getting het up about losing a few of their 320fps (exagg!) here and there is quite amusing... 

This is nonsense btw, even you wont notice it much, you can easy see a difference, sometimes it is very subtle. Easy example is your mouse, move it fast over screen and you see many mouse pointers trailing it, if you have way higher fps there will be less obvious pointers trailing it, since the mouse will be in more frames. Actually there will be more pointers making it a smoother motion.

 

And what others have said, pace between frames is a huge difference. Even if its on 120 fps, if 1 frames misses, it will feel the game will freeze for a moment because things arnt fluid. There will be an interruption, its something you dont see per se, but you will notice.

[TheWarsimmer]

3 hours ago, Raptorattacker said:

A human eye can only percieve not much more than 60fps anyway so people getting het up about losing a few of their 320fps (exagg!) here and there is quite amusing... 

I used to believe this, and it does seem to hold true on a flat screen. But in vr, where you are seeing things at real scale, you can definitely tell. I don't know what fps (for lack of a better word) the human eye can see at, but imo it is way higher than 60.

[Guest deleted@83466]

It’s really hard to figure out what’s going on if the user’s machine specs are unknown.  So I’ll throw some things out there.

 

When it comes to stuttering in games, first thing I think of is a monitor synchronization issue.  Is Vsync enabled or disabled?  I use to have hellish stutters before I got a gsync monitor, and found some relief by using the Adaptive Vsync option in the Nvidia driver options.  But since there is no FPS drop observed, maybe not.  I think it might be worth playing around with these options anyway.

 

Second, RAM and VRAM might have something to do with it.  OS is going to utilize a Pagefile on your HDD or SSD.  If the machine is hitting the pagefile too often, that might cause some microstuttering.  In extreme cases this can lead to a case of “thrashing”, but now we’re talking a bunch of OS arcana that is above my tech abilities.

 

In a discussion like this, posting machine specs might be useful.

[depapier]

Is this about stuttering or a slowdown near many AI controlled planes/ground units?

I've noticed that while framerate is much higher than previously (hence my asking for a 75fps lock option) on AMD cards, the slowdown where many units are next to the player still occurs. I think that's something the engine behind the entire franchise has been doing for years now. But I've not seen this reported as a bug. However, this doesn't seem to make the game stutter (which means for everything to move in bursts, as if skipping frames) but to just slow down the movement of everything, like bullet time.

[TheWarsimmer]

5 minutes ago, Raptorattacker said:

For sure because we don't see in 'frames'. However, when observing something that IS in frames then the noticeability at anything much more than 60 is fairly negligble, such as a television for instance.

Personally I don't have VR but I can imagine that there are a whole different set of variables involved in that medium, for sure. Fogpipe however makes NO mention of VR.

Just sayin'...

Absolutely. Well said that man/woman!! 

 

I tend to agree for the most part. I posted before I saw all the previous posts in response to what you said. I can still see a bit of a difference between 60 and 120 on a monitor, but there are diminishing returns. The human eye is a complex thing- I'm not sure why it is so much more noticeable in vr but would assume it has something to do with the scale and added perception of depth.

[Guest deleted@83466]

I think when you throw fast movement into a picture, what the eye perceives is a little more complicated (and flightsim is all about your brain processing the motion).  You can watch a movie on the big screen which runs at 24, or a video which is 30, and you don’t sense that you are looking at individual frames, but still…it’s definitely my perception that you can detect artifacts or anomalies at well over 60fps.

 

 

Edited October 20, 2022 by SeaSerpent

[Mewt]

 

21 minutes ago, Raptorattacker said:

For sure because we don't see in 'frames'. However, when observing something that IS in frames then the noticeability at anything much more than 60 is fairly negligble, such as a television for instance.

As said, its a complicated subject with many conflicting sources. But I wouldn't call it "fairly negligible" at all. 

 

I don't have the source to hand, and I hope I'm not misquoting it - I'll try and dig it out... but there was a study done on screen FPS and the results were that the participants could detect up to about 150fps on a screen, with rapidly diminishing returns above that.

 

Regardless of the study - from my personal experience and those of my gaming friends, for some games the difference between 120 and 60 fps is hugely noticeable. It can be very game and experience dependant. 

I play flatscreen games on a 120 and for some games it feels pretty terrible and clunky to play at 60. 

[firdimigdi]

The OP had posted this previously:

  

On 3/27/2022 at 12:24 AM, fogpipe said:

My specs are i7 10700kf, 2070 rtx super, 32 gigs of ram and every bit of data storage i have is an ssd, no spinning disks.

 

I think the deciding factor here is the high refresh rate monitor (120Hz in @fogpipe's case), with a 60Hz monitor you likely won't perceive the issue when it happens. But with a higher refresh rate capable monitor, or with a VR headset it is quite obvious when it happens and unfortunately there's no way to record it. It's not a stutter as in a loading stutter (which we have when flying over large cities as their higher LOD objects load in), or even like a framerate drop and recovery.

 

Speaking from my experience in VR (I do not own a high refresh rate monitor) of this issue: if you switch to the chase-cam (F4) then you'll notice that only planes, including your own plane, are ghosting - the scenery/terrain renders smoothly. Switching back to cockpit camera and the motion is again juddery. From this it seems as if the planes are not rendered in the correct frequency and since the cockpit camera is attached to your plane it too ends up being juddery causing the whole gameworld to appear like it's stuttering. Another clue is that looking around the cockpit is perfectly smooth while this is occurring, if the framerate was actually reduced then it would also affect the motion of your head in game and this is not the case.

 

This occurs only in singleplayer with an average GPU frametime of under 8ms and a CPU frametime of 5 to 6ms with a constant framerate of 90fps. Reducing graphical settings further reduces the GPU frametimes but the issue remains as long as there are AI active.

 

For the record, since inevitably it will be asked, I've tested this both on an AMD r9 5900x/3080Ti combination and an Intel i9900K/2080 combo and two different HMDs (a Rift S and a HP G2). If I can find a >60Hz monitor to test it on I'd gladly do so at least to see if we're talking about the same issue.

 

39 minutes ago, Raptorattacker said:

Peace out and please accept my apologies if you took it as anything serious. It wasn't. 

 

No worries, thanks for clearing it up.

[Denum]

Hey guys I had some pretty significant FPS issues 

 

I had to do a full reinstall of the game. I also reset all my video card settings and its looking the best it ever has and has been playing extremely smooth.

 

 

Might be worth a try.

 

XFX THICC III (OCD 5700XT)

5800X

32GB RAM

Edited October 20, 2022 by Denum

[Russkly]

3 minutes ago, Denum said:

Hey guys I had some pretty significant FPS issues 

 

I had to do a full reinstall if the game. I also reset all my video card settings for the game and my game is looking the best it ever has and has been playing extremely smooth.

 

 

Might be worth a try.

 

XFX THICC III (OCD 5700XT)

5800X

32FB RAM

 

Hhhmmm..reluctant to do so, Denum, but might need to give it a try.

 

I have a different breed of card from you (3080Ti), but what card settings did you change out of interest?

[KevPBur]

Similar to @Denum I have found after some updates considerable stuttering. In each case reinstalling the game has resolved the issue.

I use steam so reinstalling is a simple 2 click process and getting a beer whilst the download completes. It also retains all your settings, careers, etc but always take a copy of your data folder first.

[Denum]

25 minutes ago, Russkly said:

 

Hhhmmm..reluctant to do so, Denum, but might need to give it a try.

 

I have a different breed of card from you (3080Ti), but what card settings did you change out of interest?

I turned almost everything off except for texture filtering, everything else is controlled by the game now.

 

Prior to reset I was enhancing

Adaptive multisampling

Tesselation

And I had a custom color profile. 

[Ribbon]

2 hours ago, Raptorattacker said:

For sure because we don't see in 'frames'. However, when observing something that IS in frames then the noticeability at anything much more than 60 is fairly negligble, such as a television for instance.

Personally I don't have VR but I can imagine that there are a whole different set of variables involved in that medium, for sure. Fogpipe however makes NO mention of VR.

Just sayin'...

Absolutely. Well said that man/woman!! 

Yup VR is a different beast, only a few fps can make difference between playable and unplayable and most of us riding it on that very edge/line between those two states.

[Guest deleted@83466]

I keep a spare of the startup.cfg, and after a big update, I typically delete the existing startup.cfg, let it rebuild, and then go populate it with my preferred settings by hand.  Like Bloom off, fps limits, etc.

Edited October 20, 2022 by SeaSerpent

[Sunde]

7 hours ago, Raptorattacker said:

A human eye can only percieve not much more than 60fps anyway so people getting het up about losing a few of their 320fps (exagg!) here and there is quite amusing... 

Sorry but you evidently know nothing about how FPS impacts how a game feels, and especially what happens if your monitor has a high refresh rate.
 Google a bit, might make you look less silly on forums :). If you wanna spend 30 minutes of your life you can watch this 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA
If not just know that ANYONE experinced in high refresh/high FPS games can VERY MUCH tell the difference when performance dips. And for you to claim otherwise (if you intend to do so) will be nothing but hillarious. 

 

To add something to the discussion, i have not noticed any dips in my framerate recently. What i  have noticed is that since upgrading to a 1440p display, spotting has gone from totally fine (at 1080p) to sucking hard at 1440. Its so easily replicable, i can plug my old display in and often contacts are rendered with multiple pixles, making them easy to see. Same distance contacts on my 1440p display are virtually invisible. 
Can see from various other threads that i am not at all alone in this observation. Would really advice the devs to look at the quality of the product for a bit before working on additional content. 

 

 

Edited October 20, 2022 by Sunde

[firdimigdi]

20 hours ago, Raptorattacker said:

Yeah, I see loads of (VR) people posting pretty much after every update and the 'tuning' of whatver setup they have seems to suffer a lot in these cases so they then have to go through another round of tuning. Like I say, I don't use it so I'm not really familiar with the technicalities.

 

I've kept pretty much the same configuration since the new cloud update. Performance-wise the game got better (at least for my hardware combination - and I have to say that on that account I disagree with the hyperbole of the thread's title) since then and was also helped by the release of certain VR-specific tools, but the issue I describe above has been a constant regardless of the actual performance gains which makes it all the more frustrating.

Edited October 21, 2022 by firdimigdi

[=621=Samikatz]

So most of my gameplay this patch has been smooth like a lot of people in this thread are reporting, but I had an interesting experience while hosting a private session with some close pals to mess about last night where any time I dipped below 1000ft altitude (we had the HUD on, I checked by climbing and diving rapidly) my FPS would plummet, so I think there is something going on? I restarted my game and did some tests in singleplayer hugging the deck and everything seemed fine, but there's definitely some oddity in the engine somewhere

[FuriousMeow]

1 hour ago, Sunde said:

To add something to the discussion, i have not noticed any dips in my framerate recently. What i  have noticed is that since upgrading to a 1440p display, spotting has gone from totally fine (at 1080p) to sucking hard at 1440. Its so easily replicable, i can plug my old display in and often contacts are rendered with multiple pixles, making them easy to see. Same distance contacts on my 1440p display are virtually invisible. 

Can see from various other threads that i am not at all alone in this observation. Would really advice the devs to look at the quality of the product for a bit before working on additional content. 

 

 

 

There's nothing the devs can do about that, it's tied to resolution. The higher in resolution you go, the smaller and denser things become. The contact sizes were already increased, to ludicrous sizes, and if they make them even bigger and somehow can tie them to resolution - it will look absurd. The only real thing to do is to decrease resolution.

 

I've been playing at 1440p since the beginning, but the contacts are actually too big. They looked far better and more natural before the increase in size, and I could spot just fine then too.

[Sunde]

19 minutes ago, FuriousMeow said:

 

There's nothing the devs can do about that, it's tied to resolution. The higher in resolution you go, the smaller and denser things become. The contact sizes were already increased, to ludicrous sizes, and if they make them even bigger and somehow can tie them to resolution - it will look absurd. The only real thing to do is to decrease resolution.

 

I've been playing at 1440p since the beginning, but the contacts are actually too big. They looked far better and more natural before the increase in size, and I could spot just fine then too.

Idk what they did when they increased the size, because spotting 100% got worse on my 1080P monitor a while ago, just not enough to warrent doing anything about it.

However now its really bad, i can easily play the game but no way i'll buy future expansions, its just not enjoyable.
 My eyesight is 100% good, and i have tweaked every graphics setting under the sun. Downscaling the game to 1920x1080 on my 1440p monitor largely solves the issue, hardly anything i am interested in doing tho, so yes the devs can fix this. They can adjust the scaling of contacts to = the same size to the eye regardless of screen res. 
In part i think its down to the abhorrent way gamma/lighting is handled, especially looking towards the ground, but i digress, this is not a AAA title with millions of dollars to just "fix/tweak" things. 

Edited October 20, 2022 by Sunde

[kendo]

They probably can't.

 

The answer seems to be in thread below. It's basically dot pitch for your monitor

 

 

[354thFG_Drewm3i-VR]

I delete the update folder and startup.cfg after every update file and find it helps.

[Raptorattacker]

I have hidden all my comments as Sunde seems to know MUCH more than me about everything (even my sense of humour, which I already explained/apologised for) so I'll leave it to him. I'm sure that's for the best...

 

Rap, maker of skins

Peace, love and the benevolent way

X

[Doc_Savage]

Running on ultra and don't have a problem, know stutters or anything.

[Sunde]

2 hours ago, kendo said:

They probably can't.

 

The answer seems to be in thread below. It's basically dot pitch for your monitor

 

 

Well in that case they'v got a big problem.

Because one day everyone will be playing on larger res monitors. And even if plenty of people have 0 issues, there is clearly also a lot of people that do.

My guess is once they decide its costing sales they will probably work out a solution
Up to them obviously, its not like i havent supported this title, im sure something will be worked out. 

Edited October 20, 2022 by Sunde

[TheWarsimmer]

7 hours ago, drewm3i-VR said:

I delete the update folder and startup.cfg after every update file and find it helps.

This works for me as well. You have to manually put in the new startup.cfg info again but it's worth it. I've dropped 20fps in updates before, but deleting the startup.cfg fixes it.

[FuriousMeow]

11 hours ago, kendo said:

They probably can't.

 

The answer seems to be in thread below. It's basically dot pitch for your monitor

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

I dunno, I have a 34" IPS panel monitor that's .2325mm pitch with 3440x1440 res and I can spot fine. Previous monitor was a 27" TN panel with 2.33mm with 2560x1440 res and had no issues with that as well. Maybe eyesight isn't as good as some think, or the monitors aren't as good at color differentiation, or some combination of things but when the increased visibility size came it looked a bit ridiculous to me - especially when using the "zoom" as the contacts decreased in size at a certain point.

 

This is a performance thread anyway, so that's my last post on this subject.

[RedeyeStorm]

Never had issues as described in this thread on two different computers. I am playing in VR and find 45 fps sufficient. I

[firdimigdi]

1 hour ago, RedeyeStorm said:

I am playing in VR and find 45 fps sufficient.

 

45 fps means that you are playing with reprojection/motion-smoothing enabled which indeed generates enough artifacts on its own to mask any other visual issue.

[RedeyeStorm]

3 hours ago, firdimigdi said:

 

45 fps means that you are playing with reprojection/motion-smoothing enabled which indeed generates enough artifacts on its own to mask any other visual issue.

No have that stuff disabled in SteamVR. Have some ghosting of planes that pass at three or nine o’clock but that goes to fast to really bother me. No warped wingtips, gunsight warble or prop deformations. I am using an Index and SteamVR that allows to disable it.

[firdimigdi]

3 minutes ago, RedeyeStorm said:

No have that stuff disabled in SteamVR. Have some ghosting of planes that pass at three or nine o’clock but that goes to fast to really bother me. No warped wingtips, gunsight warble or prop deformations. I am using an Index and SteamVR that allows to disable it.

 

Ah, well yes, at 45fps without motion re-projection ghosting is pretty much a given for anything that's not at 12 o'clock and steady. Looking out of the side at low level flight would be akin to forced motion blur. Personally at that framerate the choppy head motion alone when looking around would be extremely uncomfortable. But anyway, power to you for being OK with it.

[RedeyeStorm]

It is always a trade off but the performance is steady and no stuttering.